In current computing environments, it is fairly common for multiple platforms and operating systems to work together within a networked environment to provide a complete customer solution. An example of this might be a Microsoft Windows® or Linux server running an application, which communicates with a HP NonStop® server back-end where the transaction and database engines reside. For these kinds of heterogeneous environments, system management becomes a challenge. This challenge can be in four basic areas: 1) System booting, 2) System monitoring, 3) System configuration, and 4) System control.
One solution is to provide a management interface for integrated boot, monitoring, configuration, and integrated control of all managed systems. Although the networked environment may be based on multiple platforms, the system administrator or the operator should feel that they are working on one platform.
However, the problem of seamlessly integrated, centralized configuration and control is difficult to solve. This is because all operating systems have their own user interfaces for configuration and control of the respective platforms. Many operating systems or platforms have GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for system configuration and control, but practically all platforms have some command-line based configuration and control. Unfortunately, the syntax of such text commands is significantly different on each operating system. In order to operate the separate heterogeneous platforms effectively, the user needs to know the syntax of all of the commands on all of the managed systems. This is a difficult task for most system administrators.
Another reason why centralized configuration and control continues to become more problematic is because there are an expanding number of hardware devices and software systems to configure and control. For example, kernels, disk and file systems, networks, transactions, databases, backup/restore, etc. all need to be configured and controlled.